Software platforms traditionally offered a publish/subscribe mechanism as one of the core platform services. With help from this mechanism, an application could raise events or express interest in events produced by other applications. The Internet and Web services are emerging as the next generation platform for distributed applications.
Typically, publish/subscribe service is well known in the art. It includes an event broker or an event intermediary. From the point of view of the event broker, the world is divided into two types of entities event publishers and event subscribers. Event publishers advertise event types and raise events by sending messages to the event broker. Event subscribers express interest in events by registering event subscriptions with the event broker. The event broker matches the two parties by forwarding events sent by the publishers to endpoint registered by the subscribers.
The Event-driven, or Notification-based, interaction pattern is a commonly used pattern for inter-object communications. Examples exist in many domains, for example in publish/subscribe systems provided by Message Oriented Middleware vendors, or in system and device management domains. This notification pattern is increasingly being used in a Web services context.
The Event-driven communications are very useful and attractive for many purposes, especially in situations where timely information dissemination is required, where notice of changes or status must constantly occur, where real time information monitoring is required. Event-driven communications also offer an advantage of reducing traffic below the level typically required by resource-based or demand-driven communication systems. Another advantage of publish-subscribe communication systems is that they function with both multiple subscribers and multiple publishers.
Publish-subscribe communications are asynchronous and thus allow a publisher or a subscriber to be on-line as it desires. Thus, a failure of equipment used by a subscriber has no effect on the service. The publication by a publisher simply continues, and other subscribers desiring to do so remain on line with no indication that any other subscriber has left. This emphasizes another great advantage of a publish-subscribe communications service, the manner in which the individual publishers and subscribers are decoupled from one another. In theory, apart from system administrators, no publisher or subscriber need know that any other publisher or subscriber is publishing or receiving data on any publication channel.
Because of these and other advantages, much work has been done to implement event-driven communications utilizing the various data access protocols which exist to facilitate the transfer of data between disparate systems. However, none of the publish-subscribe or event-driven mechanisms in the industry are fully compliant with standards such as with J2EE, Web Services eventing definitions available in the industry.